Magico V3 Loudspeaker

Magico founder Alon Wolf made an off-hand comment to me that cut to the core of how he approaches loudspeaker design. We were setting up the V3 in my listening room when he remarked that he had hoped the V3 would cost less than $20,000, but “we couldn’t get the level of performance we wanted at that price.” Rather than compromise the sound quality to hit a price point, he designed the speaker to deliver certain performance criteria and set the price after the speaker met his goals.

It’s simply not in Wolf ’s nature to accept compromised performance. High-end audio is filled with perfectionists, but Wolf takes perfectionism to an extreme. As you’ll see in the Technology sidebar to this review, and in Jonathan Valin’s accompanying review of the Magico Mini II, Wolf builds loudspeakers to an uncompromising vision.

The V3 is the first Magico loudspeaker that is truly a commercially viable product. The company’s previous efforts have been ultra-exotic (the $329,000 Ultimate that I profiled in Issue 160), extremely limited in production (the $120,000 Reference used in mastering studios), or have appealed to a very small pool of potential buyers (the $29,600 Mini II mini-monitor). The V3 is an attempt to bring the exotic technologies employed in these previous products to a loudspeaker that makes sense to a larger audience of music lovers. Although $25,000 is hardly chicken feed, it is nonetheless a price breakthrough for a full-range, floorstanding loudspeaker from Magico.

As described in the sidebar comparing and contrasting the V3 with the similarly priced Revel Salon2 I reviewed last issue, this new Magico represents minimalist design in its purist form. There’s no grille to cover the drivers, no glossy veneers, and no fancy brochure. What you get instead is a product that’s entirely performance driven, with the external appearance reflecting the loudspeaker’s core technologies.

The V3 is a three-way, floorstanding speaker employing dual 7" drivers coupled to a 6" midrange and a 1" ScanSpeak Super Revelator tweeter. The woofers and midrange driver are all custom made by Magico, and feature exotic materials and construction (see Jonathan Valin’s sidebar on “Nano-Tec” technology in this issue). The midrange and tweeter are similar to those used in the Mini II. In essence, the V3 is a Mini II in a floorstanding enclosure augmented by the dual 7" woofers.

But how can a three-way, four-driver floorstanding speaker be less expensive than a stand-mounted two-way that employs the same drivers? First, the Mini’s stands, which are an essential component of the speaker and account for three fifths of the product’s total weight, are extremely expensive to manufacture. That money was spent on the V3’s larger cabinet and additional drivers. Second, the Mini’s cabinet construction is over-the-top; sheets of birch ply are machined into a shape that includes the internal ribs, and then glued together into a solid block to produce a structure of unparalleled rigidity—and unparalleled expense. The V3’s cabinet is still made from birch ply (Wolf rejects MDF as a cabinet material—see the accompanying interview), but is built differently. The sheets of birch ply are cut into 1.5"-thick strips which are glued together to create the enclosure.1 Between the cost savings of this technique and cutting out the expense of stands, Magico was able to deliver a three-way, floorstanding loudspeaker with same drivers as the Mini for less money. Although the V3 lacks the cost-no-object cabinet construction of the Mini, it has in its favor the three-way design, which keeps low frequencies out of the midrange driver, not to mention extending bass response. (See “Technology” sidebar for more details on the V3’s drivers and construction.)

Listening

The V3 is’t one of those products that I listened to for a long period, cataloging its strengths and shortcomings with intellectual detachment and then dispassionately judging its sonic trade-offs relative to similarly priced competitors. Instead, the V3 absolutely bowled me over from the first seconds it began reproducing music in my home, and maintained this grip up to the minute I had to pack it up for shipment for this issue’s cover photography. (The V3s are, however, coming back to me after the photo shoot.)

The V3’s special qualities are instantly obvious, and immediately identify the V3 as not just another loudspeaker. The V3 has three characteristics that are, in my experience, state of the art, and which combine synergistically to make this such a musically compelling and rewarding loudspeaker. Those three qualities are the richness, density, and truthfulness of tone color; the palpability and tangibility of instrumental images; and the resolution and separation of individual instrumental lines. Any one of these qualities would have made the V3 a great loudspeaker, but with all three present simultaneously, the effect is jaw-dropping.